Every scrap of colour fled her face, leaving her bone white. ‘I…I don’t really know. I’ve never had anyone else,’ she whispered strickenly, shattered by his cruelty.

‘The odds aren’t in your favour, cara. Four years ago, I saw you in that bastard’s arms in the street. Saw with my own eyes,’ he stressed savagely. ‘If I’d got out of my car, I’d have murdered you!’

‘F-four years ago?’ she stammered. ‘You saw me with Steve… in the street?’

‘Do you need to see it in writing?’ he derided. ‘B-but that means you must have-‘

‘Come back after you said no to the proposal?’ he incised with icy bite. ‘I did. I was a real sucker for punishment in those days. No more.’

She was trembling all over. ‘But you couldn’t have seen anything happen between Steve and me!’

‘You were in his arms and you were bedding down in his flat.’ ‘

And abruptly it came to her when he must have seen her. The day she had discovered she was pregnant. She had started to cry in the students’ union bar and Steve had flushed her out at speed. On the way back to his flat, she had told him what was wrong and he had put his arms around her. ‘For goodness’ sake, all he did was hug me… try to comfort me because I was so upset about the baby and you!’

‘In that order, I notice. The horror of the baby, then me.’

Something snapped inside Ashley. That crack was the last straw in the state she was in. She stalked across the room and clutched him by the lapels of his Armani jacket. All of a sudden, she was a raging fever of emotion.

‘That was the day I found out that I was pregnant and I was climbing the wall!’ she lashed out. ‘And you dare to tell me that you were sitting somewhere close by in a car, letting him do what you should have been there to do? Instead you were spying on me, dreaming up filthy suspicions on non-existent evidence? How dare you tell me that now? How dare you? You should be too ashamed to admit that you came that close and wimped out last minute!’

Her vehemence clearly astounded him. ‘I didn’t wimp out!’ he raked back between gritted teeth.

‘Oh, didn’t you?’ Although he was a foot taller, Ashley glowered wrathfully up at him as though she was the one with all the physical advantages and not he. She had such a fierce hold on his jacket that he would have had to break her fingers to shake her off. ‘You wimped out, all right. You didn’t love me enough, Vito. You didn’t trust me enough. You put your rotten stinking pride first!’

‘That’s a-‘

‘And then, to crown it all, you went and married another woman when you still belonged to me! Do you think that I am ever going to forget or forgive that? You owe me, Vito… you owe me for every morning you wake up without a knife stuck between your ribs!’

Still in a tempest of unrestrained emotion, she jerked her hands away from him. Her frustration and her pain were so great that she literally didn’t trust herself not actually to strike him now that she finally knew what had kept him from her four years ago. A silly, trivial misinterpretation of events, an almost laughable misunderstanding that had none the less blown her life and her hope of happiness right out of the water. But Vito had still been cool-headed enough to carry out a damage limitation exercise on his own life-that was what hurt her so much. In her imagination she could think of a lot of things that Vito might reasonably have done or felt then, but not one of them covered barely catching his breath and turning round immediately to ask another woman to marry him!

‘I didn’t love her.’ The confession was reluctant, low-pitched as if only the silence dredged it from him.

And at last her bitterness was vindicated but most ironically it didn’t make her feel any better. He had loved her but he had still married Carina. He just hadn’t loved her enough, and that knowledge couldn’t even begin to cauterise her wounds. Another revivifying surge of fury came to her rescue. She had suffered so much for so little.

‘Want to talk some more, Vito? Want to continue establishing better communication?’ she demanded tremulously. ‘You didn’t love her but you married her-‘

‘You didn’t want me,’ he reminded her harshly. ‘Oh, you fool!’ Ashley gave a stark laugh of rampant disbelief. ‘Don’t you know when a woman loves you? I said no to marriage and six children before I was twenty-five… I did not say no to you!’

Vito looked dazed. That aspect of that final hostile confrontation had evidently never occurred to him. ‘Dio,’ he said thickly.

The artificial stimulus of rage suddenly ebbed, the tears threatening. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she told him shakily.

‘Ashley.’ As he spoke, she reluctantly turned her head back from the door. His grim smile was edged by the darkness and the shadows of the too recent past. ‘Does it ever occur to you that we were both guilty of making remarkably hasty and stupid decisions?’

‘You had more choices than I had.’

‘I asked you to marry me because that was the only choice I had,’ he countered levelly. ‘I could not stay in London and I could not take you back to Italy as anything other than my wife.’

She shot him a scornful look. ‘You didn’t ask me to marry you; you told me that we would have to get married.’

‘I told it as it was.’

‘Your whole attitude…it was an ultimatum, a list of what you wanted and what I was expected to accept.’

He emitted a laugh, devoid of humour. ‘Was that how you saw it? I knew that you didn’t want marriage but it was all I had to offer. Hearts and flowers would have made the proposal even more ludicrous in your eyes. Nor was I in the mood-our entire relationship had followed lines outside my experience. I had just learnt that my father had only months to live-‘

‘You said he was ill… you didn’t tell me he was dying!’ she condemned.

‘You didn’t seem very interested either way.’ Guiltily, she flushed, recalling her hurt, defensive state of mind the day after his mother’s visit. Where his family was concerned, she had not been in a charitable mood.

‘I was already angry and bitter,’ Vito confessed tautly. ‘My father had asked me to marry Carina – in spite of the fact that I had already told him about you! It was very much in the line of a last request from a dying man. We had an extremely violent disagreement on the subject. It was the only thing he could have asked of me that I could not do-‘

‘I didn’t know.’ She was shocked, realising that in wishing to marry her Vito had withstood far more than mere family opposition. His elderly father had made a most unreasonable demand and Vito had stood his ground and refused, but the distressing background to that refusal must have cost him dear. Vito came from a close and loving family. Conservative as he was, he had probably until that moment been a most loyal and dutiful son, who had never caused them an ounce of concern. Now she understood the strongest motive behind Elena di Cavalieri’s interference. Her husband had been dying. She had fully believed that Ashley could not make her son happy. Those two hard facts had driven her into an attempt to break them up.

‘What difference would it have made to you? You say that you loved me,’ Vito drawled with derision, ‘but you must have known how impossible it would have been for us to try and conduct a long-distance relationship-‘

‘Maybe I would have liked the option!’ Ashley snapped back.

Vito elevated a satiric dark brow. ‘Maybe I might have given you that option had you not made it so insultingly obvious that you did not see our affair in a permanent light. Always you were saying to me…if I were to meet someone else…if you were to meet someone else!’.

Ashley lifted her chin, temper igniting afresh. ‘I thought I was too young to make any promises. I didn’t want to feel tied down-‘

‘So you made me feel like a regular one-night stand instead!’ he slated savagely.